Saul Bellow’s mother, Liza, liked to use an old Yiddish metaphor to describe people who’d had a lucky break. “They’ve fallen into the schmaltz-grub,” Bellow recalled her saying, a pit of fat.
Bellow himself, in terms of his major biographers, has fallen into a different sort of pit. James Atlas’s “Bellow: A Biography” (2000) was accused, with some accuracy, of having an animus toward its subject.
James Wood, in The New Republic, composed the notice that has stuck to Mr. Atlas’s book. Mr. Wood accused Mr. Atlas of “not writing the biography of a freedom-loving mind, of an imagination, but of a seducer, a bad husband, and money-earner who also happened to write some good books.” Some of Mr. Atlas’s book, Mr. Wood said, “has the tone of a Vanity Fair profile.”
Now comes, as an attempt at salvage, Zachary Leader’s “The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964,” the first of two planned volumes. Mr. Leader, who was born in America but has lived in England for more than four decades, is best known as the author of “The Life of Kingsley Amis” (2007). That book was gargantuan (996 pages) and sometimes bland but intimate; it kept its wits about it.
Those wits are gone in “The Life of Saul Bellow,” a dry, digressive and oddly stunted biography that seems to have been written less on autopilot than on autofill. Its first 200 pages in particular are so claustrophobic that they send you back to Mr. Atlas’s book with fresh eyes for its best qualities: its human scale, its economies of style, its sense of the sweep of Bellow’s life and its rich understanding of his milieus. We’re invested in Mr. Atlas’s Bellow. Unlike Mr. Leader’s, he is squirmingly alive.
Were Bellow, who died in 2005 at 89, still around and sensate, it’s hard to know which book he’d prefer. He’d detect some malice and a certain lack of respect in Mr. Atlas’s biography. But as regards Mr. Leader’s work, Bellow is also the man who commented: “Dullness is worse than obscenity. A dull book is wicked. It may intend to be as good as gold, as nice as pie, as sweet as can be, but if it is banal and boring it is evil.”
So here we are. The man who may well be the greatest American writer of the 20th century is now, biographically at least, to borrow the title of Bellow’s first novel, something of a dangling man.
The life-sapping nature of Mr. Leader’s book derives primarily from its eagerness to take every possible detour along the way to relating Bellow’s life. If Bellow had ever written the sentence “There once was a man from Nantucket,” Mr. Leader would quote it along with two pages about the nature of man and three pages about the origins of Nantucket.
You begin, while reading this volume, to fear nouns: They appear like links Mr. Leader is certain to click on and send himself down a rabbit hole. If the notion of motherhood comes into view, for example, we are off on how every mother has appeared in Bellow’s oeuvre. (“In Bellow’s fiction, there are hard mothers and soft mothers …”)
These umpteen detours — on assimilation, brothers, businessmen, Judaism, petty crime, you name it — pluck one from Bellow’s life for pages at a time. Mr. Leader prints nearly everything Bellow has said on each of these topics and others; his book can resemble a concordance more than a narrative. “The fact is a wire through which one sends a current,” Bellow once said. In this book, each wire comes densely swaddled in cotton.
Stanley Crouch did something similar in “Kansas City Lightning,” his recent biography of Charlie Parker. He often seemed to be writing around Parker’s life, dwelling instead on jazz and black life in the 20th century. Yet Mr. Crouch is so intimate with these topics that while you sometimes missed Parker, you were held rapt.
Not so with Mr. Leader and Bellow. This book doesn’t start to find its feet until its midpoint, when Bellow has begun to publish the novels that made his name, “Dangling Man” (1944), “The Victim” (1947) and most notably “The Adventures of Augie March” (1953), in which he found his rangy, indelible and often comic mature voice.
The first three of Bellow’s five wives appear in this volume, and the details of his many affairs are not skimped on. Bellow was a famous charmer, but he could also be thin-skinned, needy, suspicious, quick to explode. At least once he was said to be physically violent with Sondra, his second wife.
It is typical of this book that Mr. Leader prints the details of this event (Sondra accused him of pulling her ponytail and punching her in the face) apologetically. “These accusations and counteraccusations are rehearsed here,” he writes, “because they are part of the life Bellow lived as he wrote ‘Herzog’ … .” Well, yes.
Bellow’s life was rich with incident and humor, and Mr. Leader catches his share of it. When Bellow’s son Greg was 2, Mr. Leader writes, “Bellow taught him to point first to his ass, then to his elbow, declaring him ‘Smarter than most Harvard graduates.’ ” Mr. Leader almost has fun with Wilhelm Reich’s influence on Bellow, who bought an orgone box — said to accumulate energy from the surrounding space and to improve orgasms — and practiced a form of primal scream therapy. He was often heard howling out in the woods.
Mr. Leader provides a particularly good sense of Bellow’s work ethic. No matter what was happening in his life or where he was traveling, his work time was sacrosanct.
There are signs that the second volume of this biography will rise to fuller engagement. With the publication of “Herzog,” Bellow is on his way to his widest fame, and antagonists like Norman Mailer — who called Bellow a mere “hostess of the intellectual canapé table” — have begun to emerge.
About this very large first volume, however, words from Mr. Leader’s previous biographic subject seem apt. Kingsley Amis liked to say that more means worse.
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